1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system and method. More specifically, the present application is directed to a system and method for virus notification based on social groups.
2. Description of Related Art
A computer virus is a malicious computer program that can either copy itself, or is otherwise transferred to, a computer without permission or knowledge of the user of the computer. In this way, the virus may be run on the computer to thereby infect the computer. Some viruses are programmed to damage the computer by damaging programs, deleting files, reformatting the hard disk, or the like. Other viruses are not designed to do damage but simply replicate themselves and perhaps make their presence known by presenting text, video, or audio messages. Still other viruses may cause problems for the computer by taking up available memory capacity and communication bandwidths. This may cause erratic behavior of the computer and may even cause the computer to crash.
The original virus may modify the copies of itself, or the copies may modify themselves, such as in a metamorphic virus, in order to make the locating and eradication of the virus file instances difficult to achieve. A virus may spread from “computer to computer contact,” i.e. through data transfers between computers. For example, a user may retrieve a virus unknowingly by downloading desired files from a website or network location with the virus being attached to the files and/or the website or network location. Recently, viruses have been distributed from one computer to another via attachments to electronic mail messages. Viruses may also be spread by carrying the virus on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, compact disc, or USB drive and using the removable medium in a drive or port of the computing device. Additionally, viruses can spread to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer.
With increased use of networks and the Internet, the spread of viruses has increased. This has led to an increase in the development of mechanisms for combating such viruses, protecting computing systems from viruses, and preventing the spread of such viruses. Virus protection software, such as Norton Anti-virus available from Symantec Corporation, Microsoft One Care available from Microsoft Corporation, and others are often employed on computing devices to both prevent the infection of the computing device by computer virus and to remove such viruses if the computing device happens to become infected. In addition, software firewalls have been developed for preventing outside access to internal network computing devices without permission of users of the internal network computing devices.
A number of such software products provide the ability to send notifications of alerts and advice for patches via electronic mail. For example, Norton Symantec has announced a product that allows administrators to define alerting rules and actions in the event an email virus outbreak occurs. These email notifications may be sent by the Outbreak Notifications feature of Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering 3.0 product (see http://www.symantec.com/press/2002/n020129.html). Similarly, Scranton University has developed a computer virus notification system which is a virus notification system that sends alerts and advice for patches via electronic mail (see http://academic.scranton.edu/department/diresources/dir/cvns.shtml). Furthermore, an active vulnerability notification in which a system scans computers on a network for vulnerabilities and then provides notifications is described at http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Active—20vulnerability—20notification#1058115600.